My Gran's House 1

At the other side of the village was my gran and papa's house. To get to it, you'd go through a swing park, a wide grassy area with a set of swings in it. 

It was a house on the corner, in a quiet little street called Forth Gardens. 

There was a narrow door, and on the door, to the left, was a small door knocker in the shape of a piper. The little metal bagpiper. 

You'd go in, into the hall. The smell: it smelled old and comforting. 

To the left were the stairs, carpeted with faded orange carpet. On the stairs, the dog, Ben, would often sit. He was an English sheepdog, and grew dull-witted in later years, and would lie on the stairs with his head propped between the bannisters, staring at himself in the hall-mirror opposite. He had a warm, comforting dog-smell.

In the front of the house there was a box-room, where odds and ends were kept, and which sometimes contained a spare bed, where me and my brother would sleep if we were staying over. 

We would rather have gone home, where conditions were freer, but sometimes, circumstances were such that we had to stay. 

There was also a cupboard next to the box-room, which contained an old leather flying-helmet from World War II. The atmosphere of World War II pervaded the house. One almost felt that one was in World War II, filtered through the seventies. 

The things in that box-room: a Ray Charles vinyl album, with Ray in a loveheart on the cover. Sitting on the bed, reading a Beano comic library. Staying there with my brother, one night. 

He got the bed and I was put up in a camp-bed. My gran gave me a boy's book of saints to read. I took it all very seriously. My brother mocking me from his bed. The idea of being pious and reading a book of saints was funny to him. Him in his bed, looking at me darkly.

I also had a big book of mythology to read. It was very seventies, with painted illustrations. I read all of it, though much of it was strange to me. Daedalus and Icarus, the huge Minotaur dead, the face of Humbabu in Gilgamesh, based on one of those grinning Mesopotamian masks, the strange Finnish myths.... I possibly liked the Greek epics the best. 

The next room after the box-room was the livingroom. On the left was a fireplace, and above it hung a large print of Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross. Christ hung there transfixed, suspended, floating. 

On the right was a couch, old and comfortable, and over by the fireplace was the soft chair where my gran typically sat. On the opposite side of the fireplace was a big wooden television, and another easy chair. 

In the corner was a window looking out on the front garden, and next to it, a glass sideboard or cabinet containing plates and so on. The smell of the dark wood of which it was made. 

On the mantelpiece and surrounding it were various trinkets, a gilt griffin of some kind, perhaps an ornamental candle-stick holder, and, near where my gran sat, a wooden plaque on the wall enscribed with a prayer called St. Patrick's Breastplate.

All of this was daunting. It was unpleasantly old, but very comfortable and homely. 

At the back of the lvingroom was a dining table, with wooden chairs. The smell of the wood out of which they were made. Their velvety seats. Here my papa would sit and smoke his pipe, or drink his lemon tea. The lemon on the saucer next to the cup. 

There was a wooden serving-hatch in the wall which connected with the kitchen through the wall. 

The smell of: carpets, and cleaning products, and soap, and wood. The smell of a leather flying helmet from World War II. The coppery smell of that gilt griffin. The smell of something unutterably fragrant and ancient. 

In the top-right corner was a sort of tall cabinet, on top of which was perched a sort of Japanese doll. This tall dark corner-cabinet seemed incredibly high to me, and the Japanese figure atop it seemed incredibly ancient. It sat among voluminous folds, in its dark, elaborate kimono, smiling to itself, its china face looking out over the room vacantly. It was female, though.

It, too, had a smell. On rare occasions it was taken down for us and we were allowed to touch it. It was like handling a museum-object. The smell of ancient dust from the thick, dark folds of the kimono, whose endless layers you could attempt to peel back to find a frail china body inside, swathed in rough material like a mummy. I was frightened of it but I wanted to conquer my fear of it through handling it. 

In the hall, orange-pattern-carpeted, there was a niche under the stairs where the telephone was kept, which was of the old dial-kind, and beige, and there also were dark bookshelves and the big family Bible. It was a King James Bible, enormous and full of old-paper smell, I think illustrated with prints, and thumb indexed at the edge. The shallow, fragrant depressions along the edge, like the keys of a church organ, the leather of the binding like its dark wood, like the dark wood of a sacristy, full of mystery, slightly gloomy and repellent. 

You could stand in that dark alcove under the stairs. Among those shelves were my papa's books, a collection of bound volumes of Walter Scott. There were one or two John Le Carre papebacks, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, very redolent of the Cold War. A spare pair of glasses, thick and brown-legged. An old grey diary from 1969, with scribbled notes in it, and at the back, a calendar. 

It was World War II again there, it was the Cold War. On nights when we'd get to stay up late, the whole romance of it seemed to come to life again there among the shelves. My papa's old letters, his flying instruction booklet, his pamphlets of aeroplane identification full of diagrams of Messerschmits, now yellowed and useless, and his fussy spidery hand, scribbled in the margins of Latin books he bought second hand. I understood it all somehow, I understood the war, and everything subsequent to it, and it seemed to me to be still present there, something unspeakable and romantic and sad.